Five ways the Internet is ruining our culture

3) Time-waster, concentration-breaker, short-term-attention maker

According to Nielsen, the average Internet user spends 68 hours a month online. That’s a stunning number, particularly when you consider that the average length of time that a web page was viewed was 57 seconds.

Of course, who has time to dawdle on a web page when there are so many social networks to visit? I’m on Facebook, Twitter (here and here), G+, and, of course, I get emails. All total, I have roughly 85,000 “friends” across all the websites and receive about 150 plus emails in an average day. Honestly, I have seriously considered dropping off these social networking websites because they’re such huge time-wasters and concentration-breakers that it’s debatable whether any of ‘em are worth it. I wonder how many other people feel the same way but feel compelled to have the accounts because so many of their friends do, too.

Additionally, ask yourself: If people are spending 68 hours a month on the Internet, undoubtedly mostly engaged in non-productive activities, what were they doing with that time 20 years ago? Moreover, can people — who stay on a website for roughly 57 seconds at a clip, tweet 140 characters at a time, and have trouble paying attention to a YouTube video that goes over 2 minutes in length — handle long, complex, detailed information? Are we turning into a fast-food, slogan-based, shallow country because the Internet is breaking our concentration and getting us used to only handling small fun bits of information at a time? The scary thing is that it seems very plausible, but we really don’t know for sure.